


fairy child

by pprfaith



Series: Wishlist 2014 [11]
Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Community: wishlist_fic, Crossover, Emma gets a Family, Gen, Immortal Buffy, Kid Fic, Mama Buffy, Prompt Fic, happy fic, i don't even
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-23
Updated: 2014-12-23
Packaged: 2018-03-03 01:23:27
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,851
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2833022
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pprfaith/pseuds/pprfaith
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Buffy finds a little boy and a newborn baby by the roadside and can't seem to get rid of them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	fairy child

**Author's Note:**

> Songbirdie asked for BtVS/OuaT – Buffy & Emma (& August) – Immortal Buffy raises Emma. How does it change things?
> 
> This was awful and also an unfair amount of fun. Thank you for that.
> 
> (I fixed a few typos. Sorry for those.)

+

It’s three in the morning and there should be a roadside diner somewhere around here, at least according to the map, but Buffy doesn’t have much hope anymore. Maine in December is not a place she wants to be, and especially not this late at night. 

But there was a hunt to be finished and since it’s Christmas next week and everyone else has family, she volunteered, left her presents for the kids with Dawn, in case it took longer, and went to kill herself a wendigo in Middle of Nowhere, Maine. 

She came, she saw, she slayed, twenty years of warfare under her belt and not a challenge in sight. 

It took an hour to get back to her car and she planned on driving straight to the airport and getting home in time for her niece and nephew to climb all over her like she visits more than three times a year, eternally drawn to blood and death because they’re all she knows. 

Buffy stopped dreaming of family a long time ago. These days, she borrows that of her friends every now and again and goes to slay monsters at Christmas. 

It’s better this way. Her being alone. She’s not… she’s not exactly great company, these days. 

She didn’t plan to spend half the night driving around backroads, but as soon as she reached her car, something tingled up her spine, demanding attention. Magic, foresight, destiny. Whatever. She’s been in this business too long to ignore it, so here she is. Driving. 

At three am. 

In Maine. 

And then, suddenly, there’s a small figure in the middle of the road, deformed and hunched over, somehow, twisted into itself. She brakes hard and there is a scream, high-pitched and terrified, as the jeep comes to a halt inches away from the… whatever it is. The headlights show flashes of white and brown, big eyes that gleam in the dark. 

She grabs a dagger from between the seats and gets out, leaving the engine running. 

As she approaches, the figure walks backwards, stumbles, falls. Another scream and this time, Buffy understands why it sounds so terrified. 

It’s a child. A little boy with red hair and dark eyes and he’s not deformed, no. He’s tightly holding onto a squirming newborn, swaddled in a white blanket. Both of them are shivering and stink of hunger and cold and fear so badly, her nose curls in distaste. 

Immediately, she tucks the dagger out of sight, up her sleeve. She crouches down, making herself smaller. 

“Hello there, handsome,” she says, low and soothing, hands at her sides. “I’m sorry if I scared you, kid, but you shouldn’t walk on the road. Is… are your parents around?”

She expects the boy to burst into tears, because that’s what kids do when they lose their parents, but he doesn’t. He just whimpers dryly, the way children do when they’ve finished crying. 

When there’s nothing left in them to sob.

He’s alone in the woods in the middle of the night in December, with a baby who is presumably his sibling, no adults in sight, and he doesn’t cry anymore. Buffy knows he’s going to shake his head before he does. 

She bites back a sigh, because monsters. Give her monsters instead, any day. “Okay, then, how about you get in the car with me? It’s warm in there and the little one looks cold.”

She’s betting on the boy wanting to protect his sibling because that’s what little boys do, right? She tries to gauge his age. Six? Eight? No older than that. 

While she waits for him to make a decision, she mentally runs through her options. Social Services. She needs to find a town for that, which means turning around, probably. It’s too late to reach anyone. Police station. Maybe the Wendigo got their parents? But why would anyone take a newborn out here in winter?

None of it makes sense and if it’s supernatural, she might be killing them by handing them over to humans. Take them home? Give them to the Council? A hospital, first. But how would she explain them?

Finally the boy nods, small and shy and scared. But the promise of warmth wins out. Still, Buffy tries to reassure him. “I promise nothing will happen to you two, okay?”

She offers her hand to pull him up and after a long moment, he takes it, struggling to hold onto the baby at the same time. 

“Do you want me to hold him?” Buffy asks.

“Her,” he corrects. His voice is as small as he is, and tired. He wobbles on his feet. How long have they been out here?

“Is she your sister?”

His hesitation says no, long before he answers, “I must look after her.”

He has an accent, a strange, lilting sound. Buffy opens the car door for him and helps him climb inside while touching him as little as possible. 

“Can you tell me where your parents are?” she asks, carefully, once she’s sure neither he nor the baby are going to fly through the windshield anytime soon. She cranks up the heating, puts the car in gear and carefully doesn’t look at him. 

Giving him time. 

That’s, like, a pedagogic thing to do, right?

It takes him five miles to start speaking. It takes Buffy only five and a half to realize she can’t take them to a normal hospital. 

“Shit, kid,” she mutters, mostly to herself, putting a hand on his downy hair, rubbing slightly. He flinches at first, but then lets her proceed. “Shit.”

+

“Buffy,” Dawn says, staring down at the sleeping pile of children on the bed. Pinocchio – Jesus Christ – refused to leave Emma alone, curled around her like a kitten before bone deep exhaustion finally caught up with him. 

Buffy can relate. 

They reached Portland by dawn, hit up Walmart and then spent the day waiting on the Council to fabricate and deliver the fastest fake documents Buffy has ever seen before getting on a plane and toward Dawn and her family. 

The boy didn’t sleep the whole time, wide-eyed and shell-shocked and he finally collapsed as soon as Dawn’s husband – a medic – pronounced Emma healthy. 

“I know,” Buffy says, rubs a hand over her face.

Downstairs, Dawn’s own kids are arguing with their father, wanting presents _now_ , not tomorrow. 

“No, Buffy. I mean… I can’t take them. They’re… we’d love to, but five kids? Alli is less than a year old. We can’t….”

Buffy slumps. She spent twenty-four hours with those two relying on her and she’s more exhausted than after a day-long battle with hellspawn. 

“You’ll help me find a place for them?” She asks. “Someone in the know. Someone who’ll raise them together.”

And Dawn, bless her heart, gives Buffy a long, searching look, before nodding. 

“Sure,” she agrees.

+

“No.”

“Buffy, come on!”

“No. You said you’d help me find someone!”

“And I looked. The Council isn’t what it used to be. We’re smaller. Everyone we have is either not fit to raise children, active, or busy with their own offspring. You’re the best candidate.”

Buffy slumps. “Did you miss how I _completely_ screwed up raising you? I can’t raise kids! And I’m active. I’m the most active slayer there is!”

“And maybe you shouldn’t be!”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Dawn hesitates. She’s barely thirty-two, but there are lines on her face and Buffy aches. “It means you’re thirty-eight next month and you have nothing. Buffy, you have _nothing_. Maybe this is exactly what you need.”

The slayer, thinking of dark roads in Maine in December and hunting wendigos in the snow because it’s all she knows how to do, shakes her head. “And you’re willing to risk two kids on that?”

Her sister frowns. “He asked me,” she says. “Pinocchio – and you’re so gonna have to do something about that name – he asked me if they can stay with you, because, quote ‘you make Emma stop crying’.”

That’s not fair. 

Goddamnit, that’s not fair. 

+

Pinocchio cries in his sleep and Emma sobs herself awake when he does and Buffy buys a house because she can’t inflict that on neighbours, teaches the boy about this world and enrolls him in school.

She carries Emma strapped to her chest and lets people coo over her, keeping a protective hand on her downy soft hair, writes ‘Summers’ on all their forms and teaches Pin about secrets and the family business.

She feels like an imposter the whole time.

+

“I don’t have a mother,” Pin says, eight and far too serious, a struggling Emma caterwauling on his lap. 

“Father made me and I never…,” Buffy stops correcting his math homework in pencil, looks up. 

“I miss him,” he says, reaching for Emma’s favorite toy and pacifying her with it with practiced ease, better at it than Buffy ever will be.

Last week, she left them both with a sitter while she went out to cull a nest of vampires and when she came back bleeding, her eight-year-old son had to help her clean out the wounds. 

She closes her eyes, afraid of what she knows is coming. 

“Can I call you mom?” he asks, rocking his sister gently. 

Buffy closes her eyes and doesn’t let herself panic. She’s forty years old. No panic. 

“Of course, pumpkin,” she answers, and wishes for her own mother. 

+

“Pin!” she calls, waving at the twelve-year-old racing down the steps with his friends in tow. He immediately veers toward her, friends forgotten. 

He should be too old to hug his mom in public, but he doesn’t care. Perhaps it’s his upbringing, so far from this world, or perhaps it’s the fact that he knows what it feels like to lose a parent, but once he accepted that Buffy isn’t going to leave him, or send him away, he got clingy. 

She secretly loves it, that he needs her. That Emma needs her. That she is _needed_. 

Hates it, too, every time the itch gets too much to ignore and she dumps her kids to go and spit death in the face, but somehow, somehow, she’s gotten used to it. 

She’s gotten used to them, tiny parasites that they are, eating her life up, one bite at a time. Dawn laughs at her for hours. 

She scrubs at his hair, getting darker by the year, and asks, “Where’s your sister? You usually bring her out.”

He shrugs, shifts on his feet. “Mrs. Fletcher says you have to pick her up today,” he finally hedges and she knows from his second-hand guilt that Emma caused trouble again. 

“Not your fault,” she tells him, opening the car door for him to fling his bag in. They troop back into the building together, Pin leading the way to Emma’s first grade classroom. 

He holds her hand. Twelve-year-olds aren’t supposed to do that either, but twelve-year-olds usually don’t have a history of being from an alternate universe made up entirely of fairytales. 

“Ms. Summers,” the teacher says, as soon as they enter the room. She always makes sure to call Buffy ‘Ms’. “I’m glad you’re here. Emma caused us quite some trouble today.”

The girl in question is sitting at her desk, sulking, packed bag at her feet. When Buffy looks at her, she shakes her head. 

“What did she do?”

The teacher huffs. “She kept insisting that her real parents are a prince and princess who gave her away to save the world and will come back for her one day. While I admire her imagination, her insistence that her story is the truth upset the other children, who do not have royal parentage.”

The last is said so sardonically that even Pin, who is really bad at sarcasm, understands it. He lets go of Buffy’s hand and slips around the teacher to sit next to his sister. He nudges her shoulder, she nudges back and Buffy’s heart grows a size because, Jesus, she never wanted kids, and especially not a former wooden doll and a tiny chosen one. But here they are, mismatches and oddly named, Pin, with his ever darkening hair and startling eyes and Emma, who looks as much like Buffy as any biological child, blonde and green-eyed, and she loves them so much it hurts. 

It actually, physically hurts. 

So she smiles at the woman, bends down to Emma’s level and asks, mock-sternly, “Emma, what did we say about telling other people about your parents?”

The girl uncrosses her arms. “Not to, cause they don’t get it,” she recites, dutifully.

“Exactly,” Buffy nods. “Now come on, you two, we’re leaving.” 

She straightens, looks at the other woman, who is frowning disapprovingly. “I don’t appreciate you accusing my daughter of lying, Ma’am.” Because the polite name calling goes both ways. Emma jumps, climbing her like a monkey, and Pin picks up her bag, following them to the door.

“You’re a hero, Mommy,” Emma praises, giving the teacher the stink-eye over her shoulders. Buffy wants to laugh, wants to cry, can never pick one anyway. 

These kids. 

Jesus. 

She waves at the other woman. “Have a nice day.”

+

“Do you ever regret it?” Pin asks, sixteen and lanky. He’s been hers, has been Pin, for ten years now. Longer, she thinks, than he ever was Pinocchio. His hair has turned black, his eyes have settled on blue and he’s too damn tall.

“Regret what?” she asks, picking up the pencil Emma threw in a fit of pre-pubescent rage just moments ago. 

They’ve had to move recently, because a twenty-year-old with teenage kids is kind of stretching things. Buffy is forty-eight. She doesn’t look it. Emma still hasn’t forgiven her for the uprooting. 

Pin shrugs, a roll of too broad shoulders. “Taking us in.”

For a moment, Buffy just stares at him. Then she throws Emma’s pencil, hitting him square in the chest. “Idiot,” she chides. 

+

( Emma hates the moving. She hates that her brother’s name is so weird, that her mother looks like her sister, that her brother keeps telling stories about fairy tale characters and magic long after it’s appropriate. 

She hates the weird looks she gets when she calls Mom ‘Mom’ and how she can’t go out Friday evenings because she has to learn self-defense and the way she is terrified, every single night because her mom is out there, fighting monsters, and one day she might not come back.

But most of all, even more than the danger and the fear, Emma hates how Pin keeps telling stories about how she’s supposed to one day save the world, a different world, the world they are both from. Like this one isn’t enough. 

Emma doesn’t want to be chosen for anything. She doesn’t want to have a destiny. She wants to be sixteen and worry about boys and clothes and her mom getting killed by demons. Not... not saving an entire world she’s never been to and parents who chose to give her away. Sure, they did it to save their entire world, but shouldn’t your kid come before anything else. 

Even if she were under the curse, at least Emma wouldn’t have to live with knowing that her real parents care more about their people than about their daughter. 

Mom would never give her up. Not to save the whole damn planet. She’d find a way to do both, maybe, but she would never sacrifice someone she loves. 

So Emma doesn’t listen when Pin talks, sneaks out on Fridays and, in the dead of night, tells her birth parents to go to hell.

Mom asks her why she refuses to talk to her brother, eventually. 

“He’s away at college anyway,” she defends, sulkily kicking her Doc’s against the chair legs, watching her mother pretend to cook. 

She gets a look. “You don’t return his calls.”

“Well,” Emma snaps, stopping the kicking. “Maybe I’m tired of hearing some dumb fairy tale about how I’m supposed to save everyone. If he wants that world so badly, maybe he never should have left!”

She imagines, sometimes, that one of her parents would have come through in his stead, that they would have been saved by Mom and she’d have grown up knowing she was loved by more than the woman who found her by the side of the road. She would have grown up knowing that at least one of her birth parents cared more about her than anything else. 

It clashes with the dream where she’s not a damn savior at all and the one where she’s a regular Jane, but she’s sixteen and _not like this_ is a valid lifestyle choice. 

Mom puts down the take-out menus she was studying and rounds the kitchen table, resting her hands on Emma’s shoulders, squeezing. Emma thinks there should be lines on her face, but there never are. It’s weird, having a mother who barely looks older than you. 

“Oh, baby,” she says, low and mournful. No more than that. Nothing about fate or destiny or anything and how Emma can do what she wants. Nothing about not having to be the damn chosen one. 

Nothing. 

“I am so sorry.”

Well, Emma thinks, caustically. That really fucking helps. 

She runs away. 

She packs a bag and runs the hell away, as fast as she can, from her brother, who keeps telling stories and her mother, who looks so sorry, lately, but never does anything about it, from the sword hanging above her head.

And Mom lets her go. )

+

Buffy lies in bed, listens to her daughter’s window open, to boots on the roof, to a sudden drop and a car engine starting with frantic whispering. 

She listens and prays that Emma has her phone, that she’ll be safe. 

She doesn’t try to stop her. 

She was sixteen once, a world and lifetime ago, sixteen and chosen and she knows how it sits in the heart, to be cattle to the slaughter, a weapon to be aimed. 

In the morning, she calls Pin, who, by now, looks older than her, and tells him to leave her be. She gave both her kids everything she could, all the tools they need. Emma needs to make her own way now, the way Buffy did, so long ago, climbing under the earth in a white dress, crossbow in hand. 

She hopes her baby gets a better ending than she did, though.

+

“Emma is in jail,” Pin says, sounding guilty and disappointed on the phone and Buffy would jump on it, but then his words penetrate.

“What?!”

“Jail,” he repeats, grimly. “For trying to fence stolen goods.”

“How the hell did that happen?” she yells, even as she knows. Emma has always had quick fingers, and Buffy has been living in shades of grey since she was sixteen. Teaching her kids to pick locks and pockets, to avoid detection, never seemed like a bad idea. 

Until now.

“Did she call you?”

Silence.

“Pinocchio?” 

“I…,” he trails off.

“Pinocchio, what did you do?”

+

In front of the gates that hide her daughter, Buffy stops and takes a deep breath. 

Her knuckles are still bruised, healing rapidly, from the right hook she landed on Pin’s jaw for interfering, right after she put the fear of Buffy into that little shit that left Emma to take the fall.

He tried to blame Pin, to tell her he was only doing what was right, but Buffy has been where her baby is, has been left for the greater good, because someone else thought he could choose for her, and all she has for Neal is contempt.

He won’t show his face again. 

And Pin will be icing his jaw for a good long while for messing with things that aren’t his to mess with. 

Now all that’s left is Emma. 

Sweet Emma, who Buffy hasn’t seen since she was sixteen, who left to have a normal life and found a criminal scumbag instead. Emma, who didn’t use her one phone call, not even to call her mother. 

Emma. 

God, the girl has way too much Summers in her. 

Slowly, the gates start to open. Buffy straightens, puts on a smile and starts walking.

+

“Grandma, isn’t this cool?” Henry asks, bouncing in his seat as he shoves his favorite book between car seats and into Buffy’s face.

It’s open on Emma’s story, Buffy sees as she elbows the book aside so they don’t crash. Henry drags that damn book everywhere, showing off the stories and drawings again and again and again and, sometimes, they all hate Uncle Pin for making the damn thing because it feels like the little boy hasn’t talked about anything else since he was three. 

Still, as far as apologies go, “I’m sorry I scared your father away, here, have a book with your family history that I made myself,” is pretty good. 

Emma grabs her son by the scruff, pulls him back into his seat. “Not while Mom’s driving, squirt,” she chides, gently.

He squirms, screeching, and she laughs, tickles him until he’s a hot mess on the backseat, sprawled half over his mother. Buffy flashes back twenty years to the same girl and a different boy, having the same damn fight in a different car, thinks back eight years more to a deserted stretch of road, somewhere in the deep, dark forests of Maine in winter.

Beside her, Pin is trying to refold the huge map he came home with last month, a dozen locations marked out in red, green, black. Places that have magic, just enough to maybe…

There’s only one left now and it seems stupidly simple, in hindsight, a town called Storybrooke, only miles from where a lonely, immortal woman found a little boy and a tinier girl and kept them for herself. 

Pin’s father, Emma’s parents, they have been in goddamn _Maine_ for the past twenty-eight years and Buffy never even considered looking for them there. 

Her hands clench on the wheel and suddenly Emma’s resting her head against her shoulder, muttering, “You know this doesn’t change anything, right? Even if we break the curse?”

And Buffy… Buffy looks at the man beside her, wearing leather and weapons the way only a Summers can, at the woman with her eyes and her hair and a spine made of diamond, at the little boy who’s a miracle in his own right. 

She wonders where they’d be now, if she hadn’t stopped that night. Wonders if Henry would even exist. 

She wonders if _she’d_ still be here, if she hadn’t found those two lost kids to cling to, to keep her human, keep her grounded. 

Maybe she would have walked into a volcano by now, if she hadn’t found them. 

It doesn’t matter. 

None of it does. They’re here, they’re together, and they finally know where and when to break that damn curse. The how is going to come to them, sooner or later. 

Buffy takes a hand off the wheel, tangles it in her daughter’s hair. “Yeah,” she answers, belatedly, gaze fixed on the dark roads ahead. “I know.”

+


End file.
